King Cotton and His Bloody Surrogates

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The 1867 “reconciliation quilt,” by Lucinda Ward Honstain of Brooklyn, is in the show "Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts and Context in the Civil War" at the New-York Historical Society.CreditInternational Quilt Study Center & Museum, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

The show traces its thematic threads through that period’s fabric with such care that, after seeing the patterns, you will not easily look at coarse woven cloth, the American flag, quilts, mourning clothes — or perhaps even the Civil War — in quite the same way again. Textiles, we come to see, did not just reflect the war’s events or were just another element of the conflict; in many ways they were at the war’s heart.

The exhibition doesn’t tie everything up as neatly as it could, and the coverage is necessarily thin in places, but the overall effect is lasting. The show’s 130 or so artifacts come from a wide range of institutions and were gathered and interpreted by Madelyn Shaw and Lynne Zacek Bassett — the original curators and editors of the catalog — and restaged here through Aug. 24 with additional artifacts by Margi Hofer, a curator at the historical society. It will travel to the Shelburne Museum in Vermont and the Nebraska State Historical Society.

Intriguing curiosities stand out. Here, for example, is an 1861 pattern for soldiers’ mittens: The forefinger is independent, set apart so it could manipulate a trigger. Or look at scraps of the silk fabric used to make hot air balloons that floated over enemy lines for reconnaissance, foreshadowing air wars as yet decades away. Here too is the first flag made after Congress passed a law near the war’s end that American flags had to be made of American cloth.

Other objects touch more intimately on the period’s traumas. Hemp becomes historic in the rope and noose that were used — according to a donor’s claims — to hang the violent abolitionist John Brown in 1859. A roll of lint inspires another kind of wince: The medical practice of the time was to pack wounds with lint and then wrap them in a wet cloth. And a man’s white shirt, worn by a Civil War veteran and amputee, has one of its sleeves sewn up — not an uncommon postwar alteration, as a nearby Winslow Homer engraving shows.

But the exhibition goes further. What, after all, was the most important product produced by enslaved labor? Cotton. It accounted for half of American exports by 1850; in 1860, we learn, cotton manufacturing contributed over $115 million to the American economy. And the processing of Southern raw cotton in Northern mills created a network of interwoven economies, complicating allegiances.

Often overlooked, in fact, is the clothing worn by the four million American slaves created from what was called “plantation cloth,” “slave cloth” or “negro cloth”: coarse, thick bolts of linsey-woolsey, kersey and osnaburg. It is startling to learn that in 1860 the state that led the country in slave-cloth production was Rhode Island. We see some swatches from 1835, which, the exhibition notes, were used by a mill owner to show “the quality expected by their Southern customers.”

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A cotton mourning-print day dress.CreditAmerican Textile History Museum, Lowell, Massachusetts

Then, during the war, the industry collapsed. United States cotton production fell to about 4 percent of prewar output. Both sides suffered scarcities. But the wool industry boomed. Manufacturers mixed old wool with new to make cheaper cloth. Recycled wool was known as shoddy — a word that permanently entered the language after the “shoddy scandals” of 1861-62 revealed just how shoddy that cheap cloth was.

We are also reminded how closely textile crises affected the war; armies don’t travel only on their stomachs. An 1864 photograph shows an array of canvas-topped Union supply wagons parked in a field; more than 6,000 such wagons would trail behind the Army of the Potomac, for 60 miles. Tents were needed (one is here), uniforms, mosquito netting, blankets and extra clothing (because “soldiers in the field found that lice multiplied in the seams of their shirts”).

Textiles were so interwoven with the slavery system that they also posed an issue for abolitionists. Quakers established “free labor” stores, selling goods from sources free of slavery’s stain. A daguerreotype of a fearsome-looking Vermont Quaker farming couple — they harbored and hired runaway slaves — accompanies the wife’s astonishingly well-preserved wool and silk dress made of free-labor fabric.

And finally, there are quilts, which appear throughout the exhibition as its most imposing artifacts. With their multisectional construction, they can encompass multiple perspectives; and with their long processes of handiwork, they can reflect and recount extended histories. They remind us, as the exhibition points out, that the Civil War was not simply a geographical conflict: “Disagreements were complex and cross-sectional.” And sometimes, ambiguous.

A lovely 1859 botanical quilt from the Shenandoah Valley, for example, contains squares picturing 23 native Virginian flowers. They surround another square showing a “Tree of Liberty” that holds 30 apples, one for each of the states at midcentury. Is this quilt a declaration of state loyalty or a reminder of Union allegiance? It was made by Esther Matthews for her grandson, who died of wounds in the Confederate Army.

Another quilt here is made by a man, Sgt. Stephen Al Lewis, who stitched it from blanket scraps and uniforms while recovering in a Union hospital. Lewis had escaped from Confederate imprisonment, had his life saved by an enslaved woman who hid him, and then, remembering that assistance, gave shelter to an African-American fleeing Oklahoma’s race riots in the 1920s.

There is a quilt made by two slaves in Tennessee for their own use; an “album quilt” made by women in an aid society, each contributing a square with a message for soldiers; and a vibrant quilt patterned with oak leaves and berries from Paducah, Ky., a prewar heirloom that was buried to protect it from ransacking Union soldiers. An 1867 quilt, known as the “reconciliation quilt,” was created by Lucinda Ward Honstain in Brooklyn as a postwar folk album; one square shows a black man addressing a white man on horseback, saying “Master I am Free.”

And lest we take that sentiment’s optimism as conclusive, the show includes a Ku Klux Klan hood from 1920s Vermont — a mask of white cloth made for a woman — when the Klan was agitating to keep Catholic and Jewish European immigrants out of the country.

By the exhibition’s end, is there anything about textiles and the Civil War that will ever seem quaint again?